Electronic mail messages, i.e., email, are becoming a preferred method of communication in business today. Companies with a large number of employees often have difficulty processing a large volume of incoming emails in an efficient and transparent manner. In particular, current systems and methods of processing emails are limited and impossible to track. For example, incoming emails may be sent to an incorrect employee email account, which may require forwarding the email message to the correct employee email account. Subsequently, processing of the email may require forwarding the email to more than one department that may perform various, distinct activities associated with the email. This method of forwarding emails to various users' inboxes does not allow other system users to track the location of the email or quickly determine whether the email has been processed properly.
For example, within a law firm, a potential client may email an attorney with legal questions. Subsequently, the attorney may forward the email to a legal assistant that may schedule an initial consultation. Thereafter, a legal secretary may be responsible for booking a conference room in accordance with the scheduled consultation, sending a confirmation email to the potential client, and placing the consultation time, date and meeting location on the attorney's calendar. Current email systems do not provide the attorney with a simple way to verify that the potential client was processed promptly and correctly throughout the initial intake process.
As another example, a client may email an attorney inquiring about docketing deadlines or invoices, which, in many current email systems, would require forwarding the email to a paralegal or an accounting department. Accordingly, it may be difficult for a supervising entity to determine at what stage in a company process a matter associated with the email is currently at, and whether the matter was promptly attended to and resolved. Current email processing systems do not provide an efficient system for properly assigning emails to a single individual, and/or tracking the life of an email as it is handled and responded to by one or more individuals within a company according to a company process.
Current email systems do not provide a method that allows supervising entities to distribute the receipt and handling of emails evenly to employees that are qualified to handle such emails so that any single individual is not overloaded with an undue share of the emails. Additionally, current email systems do not provide the capability to analyze the efficiency of employee email processing in order to improve productivity and identify areas that require improvement. Even where some companies have developed an efficient internal process for handling various types of emails, current email systems provide limited functionality, which does not allow such companies to implement these internal processes in an efficient manner.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.